Trump Will Probably Cave to Nancy Pelosi

With family members and friends on furlough and unpaid as a result of the Trump forced government shutdown, I am sensitive to the financial concerns of such people who have mortgages to pay, food to buy, and children to cloth and support even if Trump does not.  Here in Virginia, one can hope that federal workers will vent their revenge on Republicans in the upcoming 2019 Virginia elections.  Flipping the Virginia General Assembly to full Democrat control would be a nice way to "flip the bird" to Trump and Vichy Republicans.  In the shorter term, the question is when and if Trump will capitulate to Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats. A piece in New York Magazine predicts - I hope the prediction proves true - Trump will fold and lie to his base that he "won"  - a lie they will gladly and blindly accept.  The piece also looks at the fecklessness of Congressional Republicans who still place party and personal aspirations ahead of the good of the country.  Here are highlights:

Pelosi is the most seasoned and arguably the most impressive leader that the Democrats currently have, the party’s presidential aspirants included. When she talks about the wall being fundamentally immoral and un-American, as she did upon reassuming the Speakership this week, she is drawing a line she won’t cross. Strictly as a political matter, she’s holding too many cards to back down. Trump’s exuberant embrace of ownership of the shutdown in last month’s Oval Office meeting is self-incriminating video he can’t claw back. The record of the Senate Republicans’ pre-holiday vote to fund the government and avert a shutdown can’t be erased just because Mitch McConnell, deferring to Trump, now refuses to bring the exact same legislation back to the floor. And the pain a prolonged shutdown will inflict will metastasize, inflicting political pain on the GOP’s narrow Senate majority as well.
 Trump says that most federal employees directly affected by the shutdown are Democrats. Even if that could be proved, it’s irrelevant. Not having a clue about how government works, [Trump] the president doesn’t seem to realize that the shutdown will reach deeply into the private sector. Four out of ten people working for the federal government are contractors, according to a 2017 analysis cited by the Washington Post. Small vendors who provide everything from cafeteria workers in government facilities to IT services to government offices will suffer. The absence of federal employees in Washington who approve paperwork essential to the smooth running of big and small business alike will disrupt households in all 50 states. They will call their senators. Something will have to give.

What will? The two senators who are already talking about defecting, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine, have little choice but to do so: They are the two GOP incumbents up for reelection in 2020 in states won by Hillary Clinton. . . . Martha McSally, appointed to her seat in purple-ish Arizona and also up in 2020, may be another gettable Republican vote. There are other potential wild cards, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and the retiring Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. But there’s also a scenario where the impulsive Trump gets bored or distracted and moves on to other battles of a more existential urgency. The investigations being conducted by Robert Mueller, the Southern District of New York, and the new Democratic House have not taken a break for the shutdown. Whatever new results they bring will command his attention with or without any House move toward impeachment.

When Trump capitulates on the shutdown, he’ll say he’s “won” no matter what the particulars are. He’s already been readying that plan . . . . He knows that his base will buy any victory he claims, and it’s likely that the hard-liners at Fox News, including Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, will get with the program as well when there’s no other way out.

For all his showboating, one senator who will not break with the party line on the shutdown is Romney, who is on record supporting Trump’s push for the wall. . . . . As many have said apropos of Trump, people don’t change in their 70s. That’s equally true of Romney, a vacillator and flip-flopper who started backtracking from his op-ed within 24 hours of its publication by the Washington Post, much as he had backtracked on his 2016 criticisms of Trump . . . . The real point of Romney’s piece, despite his denials, is to at least leave the door open for a presidential run. And this has led to a certain amount of Washington speculation imagining a 2020 GOP presidential primary in which Flake, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio all run to restore sanity to their party in a post-Trump era.

They may run, but it’s too little and too late. . . . . The GOP is the Trumpist party. Whenever and however Trump leaves office, the notion that a Flake or a Romney might restore the old regime is a fantasy — just as it was a nonstarter when a previous generation of Establishment Republicans typified by Nelson Rockefeller and Romney’s father, George, imagined they could thwart the rise of the Goldwater-Reagan revolution. Trump’s base will regard the GOP Trump critics, meek as they are, as saboteurs of the cause, as indeed they characterized Romney this week.